First-order effects

• iPhone users get a ground-up revamp of one of the App Store's most-downloaded apps after a two-week review wait — a delay Hewitt flagged publicly, putting Apple's approval cadence back under scrutiny in the same week Apple approved Spotify's closely watched app and forced iStat to strip features from an update.
• Facebook deepens its hold on the iPhone at a moment when analysis pegs the app economy above $2.4 billion a year, with its native client functioning as the network's main mobile surface.

Second-order effects

• Every rival social network's mobile team now benchmarks against a free, polished, annually rewritten client, raising the baseline cost of competing for phone real estate.
• Developers shipping through Apple's store get another data point that review time and feature-trimming are material business risks, strengthening the case for open-source component libraries like Three20 that let small teams ship native-quality interfaces faster.

Third-order effects

• If major platforms keep treating the smartphone app as their primary consumer touchpoint, control over the App Store queue becomes a strategic chokepoint between social networks and their users — gatekeeper discretion over what ships, and when, hardens into industry structure.
• The practice of a single developer open-sourcing the UI toolkit behind a flagship app points toward shared native frameworks as standard infrastructure for third-party development.